CHAPTER V

_REJUVENATING THE METROPOLITAN INNER CIRCLE_

“So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”--Ps. ciii. 5.

CONSTRUCTION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND METROPOLITAN DISTRICT RAILWAYS

Can anything be satisfactorily rejuvenated? Is there any truth in the Medean story that old age can revert to the vigour of young manhood?

In 1903 the usual reply is “No.” If a theatre becomes dilapidated, it is pulled down. If a railway-station gets much out of repair, the company proceeds to reconstruct, and not to patch up. If a macadamised thoroughfare gives signs of too much wear and tear, it is broken up and relaid with wood blocks.

In fact, rejuvenation on a large scale is so seldom attempted that the scheme for renovating and electrifying the Inner Circle Railway may be regarded as something remarkable.

For convenience we will call it the Inner Circle, but, as we all know, it is a dual concern controlled by the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District, both of them old enough to have a respectable history.

Fifty years ago railways within the boundaries of Inner London were non-existent, the nearest points approached by the country lines being at Battersea, Euston, St. Pancras, Shoreditch, Paddington, London Bridge, and Waterloo--miles away from the central districts.

It was an ideal time for omnibus companies, who charged pretty well what they liked: and for cabmen, whose fare was nominally restricted to eightpence a mile, but who were masters of the situation when passengers with luggage had to be conveyed from the termini. Yet, although many suggestions were made, including that of a great central station where all the lines might converge, the travelling world was considerably startled in 1854 by a proposition laid before Parliament to construct an underground line from Farringdon Street to Bishop’s Road, Paddington; and so astonished were capitalists that although the bill passed, the money was so slow in coming in that work could not be begun until six years later!

In planning the route a golden opportunity was lost of anticipating the Twopenny Tube; but the opposition of Oxford Street was so fierce that the line had to be poked away beneath the Marylebone Road in the north-west of London, convenient for residents in Paddington and Bayswater, but useless to other districts, and, what was more important, it did not go to the Bank, the centre of the business world.

However, we, then as now, were but a slow people, therefore really comprehensive schemes found little favour in the “fifties” and “sixties.” For three years the Marylebone and Euston roads were closed to traffic, and presented the appearance of a besieged city’s outskirts where deep trenches and fortifications were being made. The roadway was removed to a great depth; pipes and sewers were taken away and replaced; foundations were underpinned, and a series of solid brick tunnels were slowly and laboriously constructed and covered up. The plank pathways, the noise, and the smells, drove householders along the route to desperation; and, on nearing the City, the problem of dealing with the old Fleet Ditch was at one period thought insoluble. No wonder that, what with compensation to owners of damaged property, the acquisition of necessary land, and engineering difficulties, the cost of the line at some points mounted up to a million sterling per mile!

At last the first section was completed; and in September, 1862, a trial trip was made. A contemporary picture represents the train passing Portland Road Station, its open trucks in the rear full of enthusiastic guests waving flags and tall hats--after luncheon probably--evidently delighted with the success of the undertaking. But at the formal opening, January 9th, 1863, a grand banquet was given in the Farringdon Street Station, three long tables occupying the rail and platform space, with a [ shaped table on a daïs for the principal guests.

The following day thirty thousand passengers journeyed over the line, and everybody in London talked about the Underground as somewhat of a marvel. But people exhibited strange ignorance on the subject, nervous people preparing for wonderful possibilities, imagining that the cellars would collapse as the trains thundered by, or that the houses would tumble through on to the line, flinging their occupants before some passing engine!

Yet, after all, the Underground was only an ordinary tunnel (such as pierce a score of hills), placed in an exceptional position in the midst of London.

Bit by bit, as years went by, the Metropolitan Railway extended itself eastward and westward to High Street, Kensington, whence the District Railway that had sprung into existence went ahead and got as far as Westminster, its line being partly open and partly tunnelled. There the District stuck for three years, and then found its way into the City (a great boon as an alternative route). At the Mansion House Station it seemed determined to rest for a long period; the Metropolitan showing the same propensity at the Moorgate Street sheds, until City men began to give up all hope of the two ends ever meeting.

It came about at last, however, and the year 1884 witnessed the completion of the irregular Inner Circle--a total length of about 12½ miles--by way of Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Mark Lane, the Monument, and Cannon Street, without any serious disturbance of the traffic, but with much wonderful underpinning of warehouses and offices (a notable instance of this operation being beneath King William the Fourth’s statue, which weighs over 250 tons!).

At first there were no smoking-carriages, but the numerous complaints on the subject induced the directors to alter their rules, and they went to the other extreme, so that now non-smokers think there seem to be more smoking-carriages than any others.

In its young days the Metropolitan was clean and its atmosphere tolerable. In fact, it had been proposed to use smokeless engines, but for some reason the idea was abandoned, and, as the main railway lines began to send out feelers towards the inner districts of London, they sought for, and obtained, running powers over the Underground, junctions being made with the Great Northern Railway and Great Western, the London and North Western, and the Midland. Consequently, the number of trains immensely increased, and the smoke nuisance was intensified. Ventilating shafts were adopted, and afforded some relief, but the imprisoned fog of winter precipitated the “blacks,” and summer weather only made the atmosphere still more stifling; while Baker Street, Gower Street, and King’s Cross stations and tunnels were positive infernos, and for how many deaths from asthma and bronchitis they were responsible no one knows!

The rolling-stock of the Metropolitan became dirtier and dirtier, grime and disfigurement settled down upon it, and everybody’s experience of it resembled that of Mrs. Lilian Rosamond, described in Chapter VIII.

THE NEW DISTRICT RAILWAY

Just opposite St. Mark’s College, Chelsea, is a narrow thoroughfare called Lot’s Road, leading to a creek that separates the Borough from Fulham. Tradition says that the locality was formerly known as “The Lots” (about four acres in extent), and was granted to a Sir Arthur Gorges by the lord of the manor, in lieu of certain rights over land which he gave up for the formation of the Kensington Canal; but incredulous old folk dismissed this tradition with contempt, and maintained that there was a Chelsea personage named Lot, very distantly related to the patriarch’s nephew, who pitched his tent in the fertile Jordan Valley, and that the dismal Chelsea wastes so much resembled the desolateness of the fatal plains, that diligent search therein might even result in the discovery of the Pillar of Salt, brought over to this country at some remote period by a pious descendant! But whoever, or whatever, the name Lot may represent, it is now associated with one of the greatest electrical undertakings of the age--the huge generating station of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London, Limited, who, as at present arranged, will supply the District and other railways with power.

At the bottom of Lot’s Road, and at a point on the Middlesex bank of Battersea Reach, facing the ugly parish church of St. Mary, is the mouth of Chelsea Creek, filled twice a day by the muddy waters of the Thames, and here the Electrical Works are being erected. They are in sight of an obscure cottage in Cheyne Walk where the painter Turner lived in concealment, and where he died. The building, with its four great chimney-shafts, is unæsthetic to a degree, and Turner would probably have thought it ruined his favourite landscape. But it represents something more valuable than æsthetic effect.

When Matthew Doulton, in the infancy of steam, took the Russian Prince Potemkin round the works at Soho, Manchester, the distinguished visitor inquired, “What do you sell here?” “We make and sell here,” replied James Watts’ partner, “that which all the world wants--_Power_.” And this, on a scale undreamt of by the famous engineer, is what the Underground Electric Railway Company of London will produce, in view of the river scenery so much admired by the chief of impressionists, and which he never wearied of depicting.

This temple of electric force will be the largest in the Old World. In New York, the Manhattan and the Metropolitan companies both have power stations slightly smaller. The Rapid Transit Commission have projected one that will be bigger, while the Waterside station of the Edison Illuminating Company (partially completed) is on a still larger scale. It has, however, been stated that the biggest power scheme on earth will be at Massena, on the St. Lawrence River, Canada, where there will be fifteen Westinghouse machines, equal to a total of 75,000 kilowatts.

Within the temple there will be turbo-generators fifty feet in length and ten feet high, constructed by the British Westinghouse Company at their Trafford Park

Works, Manchester, capable of producing the prodigious quantity of 60,000 electrical kilowatts, at a pressure, or force, technically speaking, of 11,000 volts. In other words, about 100,000 horse-power could be sent out, theoretically equal to the lifting of over 1,000,000 tons a foot high every minute.[3] Six such power stations could, therefore, move the great pyramid of Cheops (over 6,000,000 tons weight), and carry it bodily off on colossal rails, and dump it down anywhere to order.

For condensing purposes, an enormous quantity of water will be required, and every twenty-four hours 19,000,000 gallons of water (at times mounting up to 40,000,000 gallons) will be drawn from the creek for use in the power house.

The force of 11,000 volts will be much too powerful for direct application to the purposes of locomotion. It requires reducing by transformers and rotary converters into the safe and ordinary current of about 550 volts, which will be effected at sub-stations--Earl’s Court, South Kensington, Victoria, Charing Cross, Mansion House, and other places along the line. To these the current will be sent from the power house, and reduced by the transformers into ordinary low-pressure voltage, and the fiery O.P. spirit tamed to a pleasant and portable “under-proof” standard! The current will then be distributed to two conductor-rails, one located between the present running rails, and the other outside them. The motors on the trains will receive the current from one rail by means of a sliding contact-shoe, and return it to the other rail in the same manner. In passing through the motor the electricity causes the armature to revolve, which motion, by means of gearing, is communicated to the carriage axle.

So much for the driving-power of the trains. But what kind of trains do the public expect?

Surely not the old carriages cleaned up and re-upholstered--made “to last a little longer,” until broken up for firewood and old iron. The public will not be disappointed in the new cars, nothing as yet having been seen in London to equal them.

The trains will be run on the principle of the multiple unit. That is, each will be made up of seven coaches--three long motor-cars and four trail-cars--with a motor-man’s cab at each end, and one in the centre. These eight-wheeled coaches will be rectangular at the sides--not sloping like those of the Waterloo Tube Company--and very roomy, 52 feet long and about 8 feet 2 inches wide inside, and about 8 feet 7 inches from the floor to the middle of the roof.

The arrangement of the seats will be somewhat different from that of the Tube. There will, of course, be corridor cars, which will be entered from the platforms, through telescopic doors; there will be also sliding doors. The gain in leg-space will be great, the centre gangway giving a clear 4 feet, and there will be fewer cross seats. Each train will hold about 338 passengers; the ventilation of the cars will be perfect; and the height sufficient for a giant. As the District tunnels are 25 feet in diameter, and 15 feet 9 inches from the rail level to the crown of the arch, there will be about 2 feet of head-room, about 2 feet 6 inches between each train, and the same between the trains and the sides of the tunnels.

Compare this with the present Inner Circle trains that carry about three hundred passengers, with gangways that, even in the first-class compartments, leave no room for incomers to avoid a leg entanglement, and whose height will hardly admit a tall man in a tall hat to stand upright. Also compare it with the dimensions of the Central’s cars, which are 39 feet long, 8 feet wide, and whose height to the middle of roof is only 7 feet 5 inches, the gangway narrow, with seats in each car for forty-eight people. The space in the cars of the City and South London, and the Waterloo and City, is still more exiguous.

It is proposed to run about twice as many trains as at present, each journey to be made in about two-thirds of the time now required; that is to say, the trains that now run about ten miles an hour will, it is anticipated, work up to at least fifteen miles; the total carrying capacity being estimated at 70,000,000 per annum, increasable, if necessary, to 100,000,000. There may be an all-night service, for the convenience of people engaged at Covent Garden market, and for journalists and others whose work lies in the vicinity of Fleet Street. A somewhat novel and economical feature will be that the trains, during the stock hours of the day, can be run in short lengths, as in the City and Waterloo Railway, and, with their triple motors divided, will resemble those strange Naidæ worms of the Annelida class that possess the power of increasing by mechanical division. They will also be able to go forward and backward without reversing the motor engines.

Brilliant will be the lighting of the cars and stations; the tunnels, too, are to be illuminated. Fresh air will be obtained by the frequent movements of the trains through the tunnels, while smoke and smuts will, of course, become things of the past. The stations, with their wide and roomy platforms, will in some cases be lengthened by fifty feet to accommodate the three-hundred-and-fifty-feet-long trains, and be thoroughly cleansed and repainted, and the tunnels may possibly be whitened by means of “spraying”--the principle adopted at the Chicago Exhibition for the finials of the pavilions.

The question of classes, fares, and tickets has not yet been settled, but we may assume that the system adopted will be somewhat like that of the Tube. The entire project closely resembles the Metropolitan Underground Railway of Paris, and the Boston Subway. Lifts are not at present contemplated, and probably their absence will be no great loss to active travellers, nor even to the “old, subdued, and slow,” for trains will so quickly succeed one another that the missing of one will involve no serious delay. Possibly, however, as time goes on, some new and convenient form of sloping footway may be adopted.

But alas! for the lovers of the beautiful, the directors, we are told, “have not decided that they will be warranted in sacrificing, on æsthetic grounds, the revenue derived from advertisements.”

Then, again, as there will be little or no waiting, even the most impatient of _voyageurs_ will hardly need the diversion obtained by a trial of the omnipresent penny-in-the-slot machines, or the contemplation of the numerous works of art displayed on the station walls. They will not even need the bookstalls, much less to gape at the contents-bills of the daily paper.

And, provided the glass roofs be kept clean, and the atmosphere innocent of smoke and gas, might not the stations--sheltered as they are from the vagaries of weather, and brilliantly lighted--be transformed into modified winter gardens, with sturdy flowers and shrubs filling up nooks and corners, and bold paintings (frequently renewed) of distant lands, seascapes, and historical subjects, in the recesses now covered by “Reckitt’s Blue,” etc.? The frequent stopping of trains would be actually welcomed, and people would travel by the “Circle” for the sake of seeing the novelties! In fact, every station might be converted into a thing of beauty.

One other suggestion for the directors of the new Inner Circle. Cannot something be contrived in the new cars to effectually deaden the sound of the closing and opening of doors, so irritating to modern nerves, and unpleasantly associated with the “banging” in the old carriages, and the “clashing” of the telescopics in the Tubes.

THE NEW METROPOLITAN RAILWAY

The Metropolitan Railway will be electrified in a very similar manner to the District Railway, the system being the same, _i.e._ alternating three-phase, converted at sub-stations into continuous current. Access to the platforms will be by short staircases, and not by lifts. It is said that when steam is abolished the appearance of the stations may possibly be improved, but the advertisements are too important a source of revenue to be removed, and, as the Company says, “they act as a relief to the bare walls, and their withdrawal would answer no good”! An effort will be made to cleanse the tunnels, but it has not yet been decided what method will be adopted.

There exist an abundance of open spaces, ventilating-shafts, and holes, and the frequent passing of trains in contrary directions will necessarily keep the air in motion, and thus, as in the District, the problem of ventilation will solve itself.

The cars will be of the corridor type, seven to a full train, each end car and the middle one having a motor, and if the contingencies of the traffic do not require a large train, it will thus be possible to divide it and run it in two parts. The seating will be both transverse and longitudinal, and considerably over four hundred passengers it is said can be accommodated in each full train. As to day and night services, their frequency, the fares, and the distinction of classes, nothing has yet been decided.

About a mile from Wembly, where “Watkins’ Folly,” as it is locally called--at one time aspiring, like Babel’s, to “reach unto heaven”--shows gauntly against the skyline its first stage of only 150 feet, is Neasden, where, on land belonging to the Metropolitan Railway, is being erected its power house (the most extensive in the kingdom owned by a single railway company), capable of producing some 14,000 kilowatts. Water in abundance will be obtained by means of artesian wells now being bored in the chalk; and coal can be readily supplied. The current will be applied to cars, as on the District, by a conductor-rail placed in the near side of the permanent way, with a return fixed in the centre of the running track. By the end of 1903 it is hoped that the work will be sufficiently advanced for some trains to be run by electricity. Finally, as the Metropolitan’s engineer-in-chief remarks, there will be no marked novelties, but “the very conversion from steam to electric traction will prove a great novelty and an attraction. New cars of the latest type will be introduced, the stations will be bright and cheerful, the atmosphere pure; travel will be undertaken with a greater degree of comfort, and freedom from disagreeable odours. In short, nothing that can reasonably be expected to be performed in the interests of the public will be left undone.”

AMERICAN CAPITAL

A good deal has been said in reference to the source whence the necessary capital has been obtained for rejuvenating the Inner Circle, patriotic people objecting to the so-called Americanising of this great undertaking, though it is hardly a logical objection.

If British capitalists are lacking in enterprise, there is no reason why London should wait until they evince it. The world will not go to sleep while Lombard Street hesitates. As Mr. Perks, M.P., Chairman of the District Company has said, out of the five millions sterling invested in the new Underground Electric Railway Companies of London, Limited, less than two millions were held in America, and three millions on this side the Atlantic. “I do not care,” he said, “where the money comes from, so long as it is good money”--a wise remark, like the _non olet_ of Suetonius. What matters it whence the materials of a sovereign have come? They cannot be ear-marked, and whether its gold is Brazilian, Australian, South African, or American, is of no consequence. It is a legal tender, and worth twenty silver shillings.

Another matter that has engaged public attention is the apparent difference of opinion between the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District Companies, as to the control of the Inner Circle. Nature has designed them to be one, and but for vested and promoters’ interests, they probably would have been one from the first. They are not merely brother and sister, but are united by a closer tie, therefore their motto surely ought to be _Quis separabit_!

Let us hope that long before the scheme is completed there will be a reconciliation, and a satisfactory working arrangement made “out of court” between these two parties to an unnecessary divorce suit.

The two lines have carried their millions of passengers, and the rejuvenated Inner Circle during its new and beneficent career is destined to carry very many millions more, and prove a great boon to the metropolis.